Articles, Commentary

What will our homes look like in 100 years?

Super skyscrapers which will dwarf the Shard, underwater bubble cities and hyper-flexible living spaces are all likely to be reality in 100 years’ time. That’s the verdict of a new study which paints a vivid picture of our future lives – suggesting the way we live, work and play will change beyond all recognition over the course of the next century.

The SmartThings Future Living Report was authored by a team of leading academics including TV presenter – and one of the UK’s leading space scientists – Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock, award-winning futurist architects and lecturers at the University of Westminster Arthur Mamou-Mani and Toby Burgess, as well as pioneering urbanists Linda Aitken and Els Leclerq.

The report was commissioned on behalf of SmartThings, a system which easily allows people to make their home smarter, meaning that at any time and from anywhere it is possible to switch on lights, turn up the thermostat or unlock the back door, all via a simple app or automatically through our daily routines – something that might have seemed like science fiction as little as ten years ago, but today is a reality.

The predictions for how we will live in the future have been brought to life via detailed animated architectural renders which show a futuristic London skyline where high rise apartments dwarf Europe’s highest building, The Shard, as well as showing drone transportation and bubble-like underwater cities.

SmartThings Future Living Report highlights:

Many of the predictions were influenced by environmental conditions, with growing populations leading to the development of structures that are better able to cope with space constraints and diminishing resources.

As city space becomes more squeezed, we will burrow deeper and build higher with the creation of:

Super skyscrapers: carbon nanotubes and diamond nanothreads will help us create towering megastructures that will dwarf today’s skyscrapers

Earth-scrapers: just as we build up, we will also dig down – huge structures will tunnel 25 storeys deep or more

Underwater cities: are likely to become a reality – using the water itself to create breathable atmospheres and generating hydrogen fuel through the process

Personal flying drones replacing cars and travelling holiday home: some of us will be travelling skyways with our own personal flying drones instead of using cars, with ‘drone mules’ strong enough to carry entire homes around the world for holidays, for a true ‘home away from home’ vacation experience

As technology develops, we’ll see:

3D printing of houses and furniture: we will be able to print exact replicas of large scale structures like houses out of local, recyclable materials

Hyper-flexible living spaces and smart walls: flexible living spaces will adapt to our needs by changing room layouts and furniture, as moving partitions make a bedroom smaller and living room larger when receiving guests or malleable walls provide extra seats or shelving on demand. Smart LED room surfaces will mean you won’t need to re-decorate your home, as walls, floors and ceilings will adapt to suit your mood

3D-printed Michelin-starred meals: when it comes to entertaining, there will be no more botched recipes or pizza deliveries – instead we will be downloading dishes from famous chefs that we will tailor to our personal needs. We will be able to 3D-print a banquet or a favourite cake in minutes

Virtual meetings and a 3-day working week: our working lives will be transformed with the use of holograms which will allow us to attend meetings virtually, enabling us to interact truly as though in the same room as colleagues without needing to leave the comfort of our homes. Time saved travelling to and attending meetings could lead to a shorter working week thanks to improved time-efficiency

Stepping into home medi-pods will confirm if you really are ill, providing a digital diagnosis and supplying medicine or a remote surgeon if needed, meaning ‘pulling a sickie’ could be a thing of the past

And finally, we will:

Colonise space: first the Moon, then Mars and then far beyond into the galaxy

On top of looking at how we will live in 100 years’ time, SmartThings surveyed 2,000 British adults to pinpoint the predictions the nation thought were most likely to become a reality in the future. The survey shines a spotlight on the public perception of the future, and suggests that building further into the sky and colonising oceans are believed to be the biggest future trends as space and resources become scarce.

The top ten predictions for future living:

1.

Virtual work meetings – the ability to work from anywhere and attend meetings remotely via avatars/holograms

48%

2.

Commercial flights into space

41%

3.

Virtual interior decoration so that you can program your own surroundings/ LED walls that adapt your surroundings to your mood

26%

4.

3D printed houses/furniture/food – meaning you can download and print these things at home

Earth-scrapers – buildings that are built down into the ground, so entire cities are subterranean

16%

Space Scientist Maggie Aderin-Pocock, who co-authored the report, commented: “Our lives today are almost unrecognisable from those a century ago. The internet has revolutionised the way we communicate, learn and control our lives. Just ten years ago, technology like SmartThings would have been inconceivable, yet today, developments like this let us monitor, control and secure our living spaces with the touch of a smartphone. Over the next century we will witness further seismic shifts in the way we live and interact with our surroundings – working on The SmartThings Future Living Report with a panel of industry experts, has allowed me to explore what these could be.

“We are likely to see the emergence of towering megastructures as well as sub-aquatic cities and transportation via advanced flying drones – some of which could be strong enough to transport entire houses on holiday.”

James Monighan, UK MD of Samsung SmartThings, which commissioned the report, says: “The smart home revolution will have massively positive implications on how we live. Our homes are becoming smarter and can now detect the presence of things like people, pets, smoke, humidity, lighting, and moisture. And this is just the beginning.

Just as the technology driving the Internet has spread to smartphones and smart homes, the smart home revolution is destined to spread to larger communities and countries. By simply turning lights and heating off when we don’t use them, we can reduce emissions. By being able to better monitor and secure our homes, we can reduce crime. By better monitoring the habits of ageing relatives, we help them to achieve greater independence and a higher quality of life.”

The report has been published to coincide with the announcement that from the start of 2016, SmartThings will work with hundreds of products from a wide range of brands, as well as working with all of Samsung’s TVs, refrigerators, washing machines, ovens and robot vacuum cleaners.